Means of Ascent (38 page)

On Election Day,
pistoleros
, sometimes appointed “deputy sheriffs” for the day, herded Mexican-Americans to the polls. Each voter was handed a receipt showing he had paid his
poll tax (usually these taxes had been purchased by the
patrón
or
jefe
months before and kept in his safe to, as Key puts it, “insure discipline and orderly procedure”). In some Valley precincts,
the voters were also handed ballots that had already been marked (in most of these towns, voting machines were not in use); according to one description,

In other precincts, matters were managed less crudely: the voters were told whom to vote for, but were allowed to mark their own ballots. (Of course, the guards accompanied them into the voting cubbyholes to guarantee that the instructions were followed.) In still others, even more privacy was allowed. Large tents, guarded by deputies, would be erected near polling places; inside, voters were given pre-marked “sample” ballots to be
substituted for real ones or, in another device, a piece of cord on which knots had been tied; when the voter placed this “string” next to the ballot, the knots would indicate the candidates for whom he was to vote. Privacy in casting a ballot did not guarantee its secrecy. Upon arriving to vote, each voter had his name, in accordance with Texas law, registered on a “
poll list” with a number beside it—the number of the ballot he
would cast. The ostensible reason for this law was to keep a person from voting more than once, but it also had the effect of allowing election judges to determine how a citizen had voted, if they wished to do so. Some
patrónes
dispensed with all these complications. An attorney for one of them—a
patrón
who let his voters keep their poll tax receipts—recalls his procedure: “Go around to the Mexicans’ homes. Get the numbers
of their [poll tax] receipts. Tell them not to go to the polls. Just write in a hundred numbers, and cast the hundred votes yourself.”

The number of votes at the
patrónes’
command was not necessarily limited by the number of eligible voters. Since voters over the age of sixty were not required to pay poll taxes, and since poll tax lists were checked only irregularly to eliminate the names of those who died after sixty, “
in the Valley,” as one expert on the subject puts it, “
the ‘machine’ votes the dead
men.” Nor was American citizenship necessarily a requirement; on Election Day, voters were recruited in saloons on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande and brought across in truckloads to vote on the American side. Starr County was “an excellent location for bringing voters from across the border,” a commentator notes. In Webb County, the small town of Dolores had about 100 American citizens—and in some elections recorded as many as 400 votes. The votes of
these
patrónes
were generally delivered as a unit. The Valley’s controlled vote—generally estimated at between 20,000 and 25,000 votes, deliverable to the favored candidate by margins as large as ten to one—was euphemistically lumped together in Texas political parlance with those 10,000 votes from San Antonio’s West Side, deliverable by a heavy majority, as the state’s “Hispanic vote” or “ethnic vote” or
“bloc vote.” In total, this “bloc” might mean a plurality to the favored candidate of perhaps 25,000 votes. In perhaps no other region of the United States was so large a “bloc” of votes deliverable en masse.

In obtaining the support of this bloc,
cash was often a decisive consideration. The power of these border dictators was matched by their
greed. To some of these petty despots, votes were a commodity like any other—a commodity to be sold. The best history of politics in the Valley states flatly: “The State candidates who have the most money to spend usually carry these machine counties.”

T
O REACH
the seat of power in the Valley in 1948, a visitor drove into San Diego, in Duval County, a town 130 miles due south of San Antonio (and unconnected to the larger city by any road—there was no direct road link between San Diego and the north; the town looked only south). The visitor drove past the dull red brick County Courthouse to a building just beyond it. At first glance, it was a long, low, graceful white stucco structure
with a sloping roof of red Spanish tiles, and elaborate, intricately wrought iron grillwork, seemingly rather heavy in comparison with the rest of the building, over the windows and doors. Closer inspection, however, revealed that the windows were opaque, and the doors were of solid oak, several inches thick. And that heavy grillwork, which covered every opening, was anchored very solidly indeed in the walls. The spaces between the designs with which the grillwork was so prettily
decorated were rather narrow, so that it would be difficult to push something, such as a gun barrel, through them with much freedom of movement. And, to increase the difficulty of shooting into the house, the grillwork jutted almost two feet out from the walls. As a reporter was to realize, “The building is constructed
to withstand
a siege.”

Going inside, the visitor found himself in one of several offices staffed with secretaries and business executives. But behind them, on two benches that flanked another massive door, were, as the reporter was to write in 1951, “swarthy Latins wearing typical red, high-heeled boots, sombreros and six-shooters, whom the natives know as … 
bodyguards.” Behind that door the visitor met a short, stocky man in his forties
who was usually dressed in a conservative, double-breasted business suit, a carefully knotted necktie, gold-rimmed spectacles and a broad smile, and who, as a writer put it, “possesses the
practiced charm of the successful sales manager he resembles”—until you noticed the hard, piercing fixity of his eyes even when he was relaxed, and the way that stare could change in an instant into a blazing glare at the slightest hint of opposition.

He was George Berham Parr, the Valley’s Boss of Bosses, the son of
Archie Parr, the legendary Duke of Duval, and now Duke in his own right. The Parrs had ruled Duval County since 1912, when Archie sided with the Mexicans after an “Election Day Massacre” in San Diego, the county seat, that left three Mexicans dead. (Later, Archie’s chief political rival was shot in the back while eating in a San Diego café.)

No matter how frank they are about other matters, the great men of
Texas politics—the John Connallys, the Ed Clarks, the
George Browns—don’t like to talk about George Parr. They downplay the role of money in their relationships with him. “
In counties like … Duval, by and large those fellows took care of themselves,” Connally says. “You might give
them a little money,” but not much. And some journalists today, in writing stories about Texas in the 1940s, also portray the Parrs as mesquite Robin Hoods, taking from the rich and giving to the poor; the support the Parrs received on Election Day, according to this theory, came not from intimidation but from friendship. George Parr himself, as one reporter puts it, “
denies he had ever made a penny from politics.”

The friendship was certainly there. In the Dukes of Duval, the Mexicans in the Valley had found a replacement for the
patrónes
on whom they had depended in Mexico, and they were grateful. But there were also somewhat darker shades to the story. As another journalist, writing not in a later decade but at the time, put it, “
The facts completely puncture Boss Parr’s long-standing claims that he is in politics merely for
fun.” In 1949,
William H. Mason, a radio commentator in Alice who had criticized the corruption in Jim Wells County, would be shot to death by one of Parr’s deputy sheriffs; some contemporary observers of “The Land of Parr” say political murders were not uncommon there, nor were beatings handed out to Duval residents who attempted to oppose
El Patrón
, nor were other forms of intimidation. The reporter who knew Valley
politics best in the post-war years,
James M. Rowe, who covered the region for the
Corpus Christi Caller-Times
, wrote:

And the true color of the story was green, if not precisely the green of Sherwood Forest. Under Texas law, beer retailing licenses had to be approved by the County Judge. In Duval County, only one license was approved, for a company owned by the County Judge: George Parr. But this income from beer was not enough for Parr. In the rest of Texas, beer cost twenty cents; in Duval, it cost a quarter; visitors to the Valley who asked why were informed that the extra nickel
was for “George.” Parr owned oil wells. But their income was not enough. To obtain more oil rights, he erased clauses from land leases filed in the County Courthouse he controlled. He took kickbacks on road construction contracts—according
to some sources, a kickback on every road construction contract awarded in Duval County. In 1932, for example, a contractor’s representative had placed $25,000 in cash “in a little black
bag” and had delivered it to him. But kickbacks on contracts were not enough. He formed a construction company, and awarded all the contracts to himself. For failing to report the $25,000 in income he pled guilty to tax evasion, and in 1934 received a suspended two-year sentence. But he went right back to altering oil and gas leases, and in 1936 was forced to serve nine months of that term.

Seemingly, no amount of money was enough. Some of Parr’s income certainly was returned to the people of Duval and the other counties he controlled; when they needed money for medicine or funeral expenses or other emergencies, they had only to go to his office, or to the nearby Windmill Café, where he would eat lunch while dispensing favors—protected every moment by guards cradling Winchester rifles and watching over him through the
café’s large plate glass window; a burly
pistolero
stood at his shoulder while he gave his ear to petitioners. Parr himself always sat with his back against a wall. But the largesse thus distributed accounted for only a part of his expenditures. He made a lot of money—in 1944, he and his wife paid taxes on an income of $406,000—but no matter how much he made, it was insufficient to support a life-style that became increasingly ducal. He had
a large, impressive home in Corpus Christi and a palatial home in San Diego—and to see that house, surrounded by low walls and lush landscaping, with balconies, swimming pool, large servants’ quarters and high arches leading into an interior courtyard, and doorways entering lavishly furnished rooms, to see it standing, gleaming and white, amidst the pitiful shacks of his constituents, was to be reminded that in the Duchy of Duval workers on county construction projects,
the projects from which the Duke was becoming rich, earned the minimum wage, forty cents an hour or sixteen dollars for a forty-hour week, and to understand the indignation of a contemporary reporter who wrote, “
Despite his enormous wealth, much of it gained directly from the taxpayers, I found no record of his ever having attempted to improve the living conditions of tens of thousands of Latin Americans forced to exist in squalid slums, on near-starvation
wages, throughout his domain.” He had a racing stable of twenty-five blooded quarter horses, and so that he could enjoy the racing in the style he preferred, he had built a private racetrack, complete with automatic starting chutes and judges’ stand; at it, he raced horses against those of other ranchers, with betting on the races, and when he bet, he bet big—as much as $15,000 on a single race.

The Duke of Duval, as he was named by journalists (in his domain Anglos called him “George B,” his Mexican nickname was Tacuacha, “the sly possum”), owned a lot of land, but he wanted more. In 1945,
the 57,000-acre Dobie Ranch came on the market, and he didn’t have the money to buy it. On April 24 of that year, the Duval County Commissioners Court approved a payment to him for $250,000, and he exchanged that
check for a cashier’s check made out to the executors of the Dobie estate, and on June 13, another $250,000 payment followed the same route. He was later to say that he had merely “borrowed” the half million dollars (although when the Internal Revenue Service discovered the loan, in 1954, it had not yet been repaid). The next year, he again didn’t have enough money to pay his taxes; “
therefore,” as Rowe was to write,
he “returned to his ‘bankers,’ the Commissioners Court. A further payment of $172,000 was authorized.” Parr was constantly in need of money to pay his
pistoleros
. The numbers of his “deputy sheriffs” were constantly increasing—“because,” as one San Diego resident recalls, “George B knew [people] would kill him if they could.” Always his life-style grew more and more
lavish; the parties he threw for associates at the Dobie Ranch became subjects of wild rumors. In 1948, his wife was suing for divorce; and he was going to have to make a cash settlement of hundreds of thousands of dollars. If greed was a characteristic of many of the border-county dictators, their leader was the greediest of them all.

George Parr’s control extended into Brooks and Jim Hogg counties, and into four other counties, through alliances with other, less well known, petty despots who ruled along the Rio Grande—Judge
Manuel Bravo of Zapata County; Judge
Manuel Raymond of Webb (a figure, one chronicler wrote, so secretive that “
little is known of him except rumor,” who ruled Laredo “with an iron
hand”); Sheriff
Chub Pool of La Salle; and the “Guerra boys,” four brothers who, at Parr’s sufferance, ran Starr County. Until recently, Parr’s control had extended over Jim Wells County, which adjoined Duval, but the young Mexicans who had gone off to war came back more sophisticated, more independent, less willing to follow slavishly “George B’s” orders; in 1948, a reform movement was contesting twelve of
Jim Wells’ thirteen precincts. The thirteenth precinct—“Box 13”—was the poorest Mexican district in Alice, the Jim Wells county seat, and in that precinct order was maintained by Parr’s enforcer in Jim Wells County, Luis Salas, a burly six-foot-one, 210-pound native of Durango who had fled Mexico after fatally wounding a man in a barroom brawl. Salas, known as “Indio” because of his swarthy appearance, was feared for his savage
temper and immense physical strength. Once, during a vicious fistfight he had with the owner of a restaurant in Alice, the owner’s wife screamed at her husband, “
Stop! Don’t you know who you are fighting? He is the man they call the ‘Indio.’ ” (The owner didn’t take her advice: Salas beat him senseless and, while he was lying on the floor, picked up a barstool and systematically wrecked the restaurant; when
the police chief arrived, and the owner’s wife asked him, Aren’t
you going to arrest him?, the chief replied, “No, lady, you better thank the Lord that Luis did not kill your husband.”)